


Under The Shadow Of Death

by melliyna



Category: Fake News RPF, Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: Apocalypse, Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 17:57:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/pseuds/melliyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of all things, Rachel cannot bring herself to simply wait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under The Shadow Of Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bessemerprocess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/gifts).



> For [personal profile] bessemerprocess for The Create-A-Thon request of 'Rachel/Jon at the end of the world' Title and opening quotation from _The Silmarillion_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ by JRR Tolkien respectively.

_The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was, is lost, for none now live who remember it._

They had a garden to grow.

As it turned out Rachel and Jon had been the last and so, they had a garden. Even here there was still something in growing things. They'd settled in a house that might once have been a country retreat for a fortunate family (indeed the photographs suggested so). There were board games, cards and piles and piles of books and magazines. Even a TV and a laptop, though the TV network had long since given out.

Rachel can't decide if it's a fortune or a curse that the place is so well supplied with fuel for the generator, with water, even with food ("survivalist family vacations" Jon says, for forms sake and they smile almost despite themselves). Sometimes it is only smiling that saves them, though Rachel does not like to think of that.

Keith had been in the city, when the first blast hit. Rachel would like to have had the illusion that he died quickly, but she does not even have that. He had stayed on air till the very end, bringing what comfort he could to the dying and those who wished they could be dead.

She'd seen the breath leave him, live on air. He'd given his love to Katy, to their baby daughter yet unborn (Rachel still has the knitted things and the MSNBC rubber duck she'd been going to hand to the little family), to Rachel, to Jon and Stephen and to all.

Before the end, he'd read Thurber. At least she knows he died in the comfort of a chair. Not like Stephen, who had died with a Hail Mary upon a street. Or Anderson killed protecting children from a mob of other survivors. Melissa, as it turned out had been in DC with her daughter, beyond reach of the blast and Richard, Richard had been in some other warzone, beyond its reach.

Rachel curses the chance that meant she hadn't been the city, hadn't even been in the state. Holed up with the flu instead, watching bad TV and going through boxes of tissues. She sometimes wonders if Jon curses but mostly, they have no energy to waste on such things. If they did they would fall down and somehow, she knows she cannot do that. Not yet.

They still have the garden.

This far out, it had been spared the contagion and the fallout both.

 

It was Jon who had discovered the garden, when they'd first found this place, almost entirely by accident. She knows Jon had been at a stand up gig very near her but she knows no more of his story until he'd run in to her, brandishing a knife and looking almost but not entirely unlike Jon. She'd had to suppress an urge to laugh, because it was so entirely ridiculous that Jon – snarky, here have a puppy as consolation for grief Jon had had the laughter taken out of him. That he was carrying a knife and there was no sardonic laughter, no mockery in it.

He had chosen not to enquire after his family and perhaps in the uncertainty, Jon has found his peace. Rachel kisses him the afternoon she learns Susan was in the immediate blast radius (back when there were still news bulletins, before the state lines were sealed – back when the Presidents face project some hope to the survivors, before the closing) and when there was nothing but Jon and his mouth.

Jon Stewart. Tasting of fries and beer. Only at the end of the world, figures Rachel. They've built a life together here, as much as you can – it's a secure location and far from anywhere. The garden thrives and Rachel learns the right way to dig potatoes and the wrong way to plant tomatoes (as it turns out, yes, they do need vines) and Jon learns to gather honey and yes, pick fruit. They both read the magazines and newspapers in the mornings still, sometimes.

Savouring the words. Savouring the books. They don't speak of it but they both want to make them last for as long as it takes. Rachel doesn't think of it, when she curls her legs around Jon and around the sheets of their shared bed, when she lets the scars on his body be reopened, when her hands relearn the lines of a pot belly that has faded away to muscle and bones and she looks at skin gone sunburnt then brown from lack of sunscreen.

She learns the lines of Jon and thinks of the lines of Jon of old. The Jon of bagels, of TV and the New York they left behind. The New York they abandoned to grow food and hide in a house by a lake where they try not to think of the photographs left behind, let alone looking at the ones that are carried with them.

Jon can no longer charge his iPhone so perhaps it is easier for him. It had the most recent pictures of his children, the blurry self-portrait of Stephen attempting to attack Keith, Rachel and Poppy. The one of the subway station with the witty graffiti, Stephens butt and of the city in the early morning, the day the first blast had hit.

Rachel had kept photos in her wallet. She wishes she'd thrown them away along with the keys to her houses, her MSNBC and her library card. She wishes she'd done anything but keep them with her. She doesn't need them with her, when she's dying. They just make it harder to go, these memories.

She thinks of Jon and their garden, instead of the ending of the world and of the way she feels her lungs slowly rotting just as the compost she makes to nurture the garden beds does.

They have a garden to grow, before the end.


End file.
